The Signature Challenge Pizza

When Kelly Whitaker and Al Henkin, of Boulder’s wonderful brick oven restaurant, Basta, collaborated with me and our Pizza Quest team to create two pizzas, one red and one white, to challenge Patrick Rue and his Bruery team, we came up with a couple of very strong contenders. You can hear, as they explain the rationale and sourcing they put into each of their ingredients, how much thought went into these pizzas.  You’ll see guanciale (specially cured but not smoked bacon), squash blossoms, local pistachios, white anchovies, lemon preserve, fresh pollen dust, great cheeses, Bianco-DiNaoli tomato sauce (and notice how bright that sauce is — awesome stuff!), and our special, signature dough made with Central Milling -00- flour, bumped up a notch with a nice shot of crystal malt. (Note, we are currently in discussions with the folks at Central Milling to package up a blended dry mix for this dough that you can buy — stay tuned, we’ll announce it here when it’s ready to ship).

More importantly, as we’ve tried to do in many of our webisodes, our goal is to bring you with us into the creative process and, hopefully, stimulate your own creative juices. This segment takes us up to the moment when we let Patrick and his brewers taste the pizzas and choose which one they will use as the inspiration for a totally new and original beer, to be paired with the pizza at the Great American Beer Festival a few months later. In other words, things are heating up as we get closer to the moment of truth. Stay tuned….